Contents

Introduction to Synthetic Biology

This quotation about the Molecular Biology revolution of the first part of the twentieth century sets the stage for synthetic biology.

It was a quarter-century ago that Watson and Crick, playing with cardboard cutouts and wire-and-sheet-metal models and sorting out the few controlling facts from a hotchpotch of data, elucidated the molecular architecture of the genetic material itself, the double-railed circular staircase of deoxyribonucleic acid. What has been learned in the years since is full of surprises, full of wit and beauty, full of the most gratifying illumination. The culmination is now approaching of the great endeavor of biology that has swept on for a century and a quarter—an achievement of imagination that rivals the parallel, junior enterprise in physics that began with relativity and quantum mechanics. Biologists' pursuit of complete and explicit understanding has begun to list the exact molecular sequences that encode the hereditary message, instruction by instruction; it has tweezed apart the springs and gears by which the message is expressed in the building of the cell, and the ratchets and pawls by which that expression is regulated; it has accustomed men to speak apparently without wonder of the structural transformations by which a single protein molecule, an enzyme, will break or build other proteins, or by which, for example, a molecule of hemoglobin will flex its broad shoulders and bend its knees to pick up oxygen.

To be sure, the discoveries have not produced the great practical payout that has repeatedly been anticipated for them. Biologists have no atomic power stations and no bombs to point to, or at least not yet. No baby has been cured of a congenital deficiency by insertion of a missing gene into its cells. There is no vaccine against human leukemia, not even a cure for hay fever. Though some of the rewards are at last imminent, most scientists have learned that they must speak guardedly and emphasize to laymen the gaps to be filled in.

The Culture of Synthetic Biology

On the one hand, synthetic biology has its roots in conventional fields of science, including molecular biology, metabolic engineering, protein design, and bioengineering. One could say that it is simply a clever re-branding of advances in those fields. On the other hand, much of the "newness" of synthetic biology has been due to the impact of a do-it-yourself (DIY) mindset associated with the open-source movement and even hacker culture that is not traditional to the field of molecular biology. The idea is that putting the tools in the hands of young and creative scientists will result in rapid and creative progress. This is a philosophy of the iGEM competition, for example. Critics of this approach would contend that such rapid progress and wide dissemination of these technologies without oversight risks having unintended adverse ecological and societal impacts. See the synthetic biology ethics topic.

Creation of Mycoplasma mycoides JCVI-syn1.0, the first microbe with a self-replicating synthetic genome. [8]

What is synthetic biology?

Types of studies referred to as synthetic biology (and other fields that might also claim them).

"The goal of synthetic biology is to extend or modify the behavior of organisms and engineer them to perform new tasks."[9]

"Synthetic biologists come in two broad classes. One uses unnatural molecules to reproduce emergent behaviours from natural biology, with the goal of creating artificial life. The other seeks interchangeable parts from natural biology to assemble into systems that function unnaturally." [10]

Bottom-up assembly of genes, organelles and organisms.

In contrast to traditional "top-down" genetic approaches that look for mutated versions of existing organisms.